WordPress Hosting – The Options

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: WordPress is one of the most flexible content management systems available today. I have used WordPress for creating anything from a simple personal blog to a fully-featured online quiz site with advanced user management and lots of other features. WordPress can also be highly optimized for multiple purposes. For your WordPress site to run superbly, however, you need a good WordPress hosting.
Luckily, there is an endless array of WordPress hosting options to choose from. We are going to talk about some of the best ones to consider in this article.

Shared Hosting

Conventional shared hosting services work well with WordPress. Most shared hosting plans come with support for PHP and MySQL as well as multiple domain names and FTP accounts. You can find a good shared hosting plan for as little as £1 per month too.

When it comes to affordability, nothing beats a good shared hosting plan. You can run an unlimited number of WordPress blogs and websites with a single shared hosting account, as long as the account supports unlimited databases and domain names.

In terms of performance, however, shared hosting may not be the best WordPress hosting option if you are expecting a lot of traffic. It is also not a good option for complicated WordPress websites with a lot of processes and crons.

WordPress Hosting

There are specially designed WordPress hosting services available on the market. Service providers like WPEngine are offering servers that are custom configured to work optimally with WordPress. You get the same set of features as a standard shared hosting account – including cPanel and support for multiple domain names – but you can expect your WordPress sites to perform better in general.

Since WordPress hosting services are specialized for WordPress sites, hosting other CMSs or web applications may not be so easy. WordPress hosting services are also more expensive than conventional shared hosting.

Reseller Hosting

Are you a web owner with hundreds of WordPress websites? Reseller hosting can be a WordPress hosting option for you. Initially designed for resellers, reseller hosting services offer several extra features that are not available to shared hosting users.
Support for multiple admin accounts and the ability to set up an account for every WordPress site are the two features I like the most. With these features present, I can have an administrator for each of my WordPress site without having to worry about them interfering with each other.

Reseller hosting also supports more sites at a higher level of performance. Services usually come with a better SLA terms, which means you can also expect better customer support, better uptime guarantee and better server resources allocations.

The downside? Reseller hosting seldom offer unlimited disk space and monthly bandwidth. In order to find the most valuable reseller hosting service to use, you need to estimate the amount of disk space and monthly data transfer you will need.

Reseller hosting services are also slightly more expensive than shared hosting. Luckily, a single physical server is usually shared among fewer users, which in turn means your site will have more server resources to use.

Virtual Private Servers

A VPS or Virtual Private Server is my WordPress hosting option of choice. There are two types of VPS hosting to choose from: managed and unmanaged. As the name suggests, managed VPS hosting doesn’t really require you to have advanced knowledge in server administration. Everything is set up and managed for you. You can simply focus on your WordPress websites while experienced server admins worry about the rest.

Unmanaged VPS hosting, on the other hand, offers more flexibility. You can set everything up from scratch, including the operating system and other low-level configurations. If you know your way around setting up and maintaining a server, an unmanaged VPS is truly the way to go.

With VPS hosting, you get a predetermined set of server resources allocated to your account. The number of processor cores (or computing power) and the amount of RAM included in the service package are there for you to use. You can also get more storage space for your VPS at a relatively low cost.

Just like other WordPress hosting options, there are a few downsides to using a VPS. For starters, VPS hosting services are relatively more expensive than shared or reseller hosting. Expect to pay anything from $4 per month for the most basic configuration. A decent VPS with 8 cores and 8GB of RAM will cost you around £50 per month. If you are running a lot of WordPress sites or you simply want your WordPress sites to have the best possible performance, however, there are a lot to gain from using a VPS hosting service.

To the Cloud!

These are just some of the more common WordPress hosting options to choose from. Cloud hosting, cloud VPS, dedicated servers and other options are also available on the market. You should always start by understanding the features you need and find the most valuable hosting option that suits you perfectly.